That is moronic. Once the first patent expired the drug would be off patent. What they do is patent the method of making the drug and litigate this like crazy. Bush pushed for (and got a law) that limits this to three years.

Yes, they do, but millions is the cost of a drug that fails in stage 1, if it makes it to stage 3, then it costs billions.

Not actually sure Google and Apple wouldn't be happier in a patent free world. Apple learned in the 1990s, after MS copied their OS, that you have to focus on innovation and make copy cats out of date and this works better than litigation. At the same time, they still do litigate because, why not?

News flash: I don't have the source code for my OS.

It might be more efficient, but there is the question as to if it would ever actually happen.

Testing a drug costs billions of dollars. A company isn't going to invest that because some executive's child is sick, it has to maximize share holder value for an MBA to give it a green light.

There is pretty clear evidence that without patents, big parma does not produce tested drugs. Testing a drug costs billions of dollars and there is no way that anyone would undertake that if they didn't think they could make billions on the other side.

Now, you could argue that we would be better off awarding value to cures than drugs, but that would require someone placing a value on cures (something I'd be happy to have the government doing, but others might not like that so much).

I was thinking the same thing. Also, space is dark and huge. Getting 3 light minutes away from something would be so stupendously lucky that you would basically never do it. When you did, you would need to know exactly where it is to point your camera in that direction so you could see it. And it would probably take you 20 or 30 minutes to find the blip and then get statistics to be sure it was a ship and not something else.

If I followed google maps to work, it would take me twice as long or get me killed (I'd have to burst through barriers to do the latter). It is constantly trying to get me to go on a freeway that is one way the other way. None of them are really there yet.

Wow, I hope you had you tin foil hat on when you typed that. The CPI is not linked to military or civilian federal employees pay. Nor is the CPI linked to medicare, pensions, or social security. A different index, that is linked to wage inflation, is used for increasing social security payments. Military and civilian pay outs are based on a law passed annually by congress and was much higher than the CPI before Obama and is zero now.

Cars existed before Ford came along, he brought the production line to auto production.

You can say that again. I don't know if you have seen a tico but the old version of this could never get up in the air, much less on a fighter. (there are a total of four of those huge octagonal panels.)

Yeah, NASA has never thought of this, great ideas!

I think I had you as a professor in a math class.

Yes. You transmit in a band, so if you looked at a RF power by frequency chart, it would look like a (rounded) picket fence with the signal power going up and down on the pickets as the RF sources have / don't have data to transmit.